Let's Talk About Democrats We Don't Like

Up here in the Commonwealth (God save it!), things did not begin well for Democratic gubernatorial candidate Martha Coakley. In her victory speech last night -- and good for Blog choice Don Berwick for cracking the 20 percent mark in the futility sweepstakes -- Coakley referred to some part of the state called "Wister." Now, I grew up in a place called "Worcester," usually pronounced "Wuh-stah" by the natives. Occasionally, outworlders refer to it as "Wor-sess-ter." I have never heard of this "Wister" place. I think it's in Georgia. John Tierney got turfed out by rookie Seth Moulton, and failed to beat the spread while doing so, which must have let down his in-laws. By and large, though, it was a fine election. Three women now running statewide, which is highly unusual up here, with only Coakley likely to have an uphill battle in her War of The Retreads against Charlie Baker. But, enough of this parochialism. Let's go wide and talk about a couple of real brown spots on the old Democratic apple.

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In Rhode Island, the Democratic nominee for governor is Gina Raimondo, and the national press loves her already because, as state treasurer, she knuckled the public employee unions, and there's nothing the national press loves more than Democratic politicians who give their most faithful constituents a damn good public rogering.

Analysts were already predicting that if she won in November, Ms. Raimondo could go on to become a national star in the party, showing fellow Democrats that responsible policy is not necessarily bad politics, although organized labor may choose to differ.

Lovely sentence, that. "Responsible policy" set up as the direct opposite of "organized labor." In praise of a Democratic candidate. And a hint as to who these "analysts" were would be helpful.

Raimondo's raid on public employee pensions began just about as soon as she was elected state treasurer. And, as Matt Taibbi pointed out in a lengthy Rolling Stone piece, Raimondo was not acting on her own. The "tough choices" she was making, she was making on behalf of people who haven't made tough choices since they were in diapers.

What few people knew at the time was that Raimondo's "tool kit" wasn't just meant for local consumption. The dynamic young Rhodes scholar was allowing her state to be used as a test case for the rest of the country, at the behest of powerful out-of-state financiers with dreams of pushing pension reform down the throats of taxpayers and public workers from coast to coast. One of her key supporters was billionaire former Enron executive John Arnold - a dickishly ubiquitous young right-wing kingmaker with clear designs on becoming the next generation's Koch brothers, and who for years had been funding a nationwide campaign to slash benefits for public workers. Nor did anyone know that part of Raimondo's strategy for saving money involved handing more than $1 billion - 14 percent of the state fund - to hedge funds, including a trio of well-known New York-based funds: Dan Loeb's Third Point Capital was given $66 million, Ken Garschina's Mason Capital got $64 million and $70 million went to Paul Singer's Elliott Management. The funds now stood collectively to be paid tens of millions in fees every single year by the already overburdened taxpayers of her ostensibly flat-broke state. Felicitously, Loeb, Garschina and Singer serve on the board of the Manhattan Institute, a prominent conservative think tank with a history of supporting benefit-slashing reforms. The institute named Raimondo its 2011 "Urban Innovator" of the year.

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Gee, a Democratic politician praised by the Manhattan Institute. The people at No Labels must have woodies you can see from Talos IV. Naturally, there is no pea under the shells.

Later, when Edward Siedle, a former SEC lawyer, asked Raimondo in a column for Forbes.com how much the state was paying in fees to these hedge funds, she first claimed she didn't know. Raimondo later told the Providence Journal she was contractually obliged to defer to hedge funds on the release of "proprietary" information, which immediately prompted a letter in protest from a series of freaked-out interest groups. Under pressure, the state later released some fee information, but the information was originally kept hidden, even from the workers themselves. "When I asked, I was basically hammered," says Marcia Reback, a former sixth-grade schoolteacher and retired Providence Teachers Union president who serves as the lone union rep on Rhode Island's nine-member State Investment Commission. "I couldn't get any information about the actual costs."

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Your Money Is Our Money. That was the Wall Street Prime Directive all through the go-go Aughts, when the financial services industry broke the national economy and then proceeded to steal what was left. The nomination of someone like Gina Raimondo by a Democratic electorate is the final inevitable outcome of Looking Forward, Not Back. Her entire public career has been based on that premise.

(Read all the way through to discover what a sweetheart this John Arnold character really is. Nice company for a Democratic candidate to keep.)

And then there's Andrew Cuomo, who is as beholden to the thieves as Raimondo is, but he's far more of an obvious dick about it. Cuomo won re-nomination last night, albeit not as overwhelmingly as he needed to in order to start booking rooms in Ottumwa for December of 2015. So, as is customary, defeated candidate Zephyr Teachout tried to call Cuomo to congratulate him on his victory.

Apparently, Cuomo kept up the act straight through primary night. He did not hold a victory party (which would have suggested he participated in a primary), and Teachout was reportedly unable to concede to the governor with a phone call, as he wouldn't give her his number.

What kind of an arrogant jackeen doesn't give his opponent his phone number? As far as I know, that's unprecedented in a major political campaign. But the success of Cuomo and Raimondo, and who their friends are, and who they're beholden to, makes me exceedingly nervous over what may happen on the Wednesday after election day in November. If the Democrats lose disastrously, losing their Senate majority, a bloodbath in the House, I guarantee you that the conventional wisdom of how the party was "dragged too far left" by that liberal lion, Barack Obama, and how it must purge the remnants of the "Occupy" movement in order to court the votes of "independents" and "centrists," will spring up all over the elite political media like mushrooms after a hard rain; "Analysts" will tell you that Elizabeth Warren's time is done, and that Gina Raimondo is the future of the Democratic party. And the rich will get richer, which is how it's supposed to be.

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